Some things come together with a plan and a process, others from an accumulation of fragments, impulses, and accidents. In 1995, after close to two decades on the Japanese rock scene, guitarist Kawabata Makoto founded Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. aka Acid Mothers Temple aka AMT. The original lineup also included vocalist Cotton Casino, bassist Suhara Keizo, and drummer Koizumi Hajime (though everyone doubled on other instruments.) As Kawabata told interviewer Jason Gross in late 2001, “The reason why I decided to start playing my own music was that I searched everywhere for the music that I wanted to listen to, but I’d never been able to find it. The only way left to me was to create it myself. At the time, I dreamt of how cool it would be to find a record that combined hard rock like Deep Purple with the electronic music of Stockhausen.†He described what he was aiming for as “trip music.†“I have listened to all sorts of trippy psychedelic records,†he said, “but I was never fully satisfied with them. So I began to want to create a really extreme trip music.â€
Everything was an experiment. Kawabata edited and overdubbed the band’s jam sessions, they got sounds out of instruments they didn’t really know how to use, “and ended up with something that is like musique concrète.†Conglomeration and accretion: that’s the band’s sound. Elements of The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Krautrock, ‘60s go-go music, Aladdin Sane-era Bowie, disco, Black Sabbath, Parliament-Funkadelic, Italian giallo soundtracks: If you’ve heard it, heard of it, or just imagined it might exists, then Acid Mothers Temple has probably played it, often the space of a single track.
There’s a free-floating social structure, with other musicians and even bands floating in and out of the AMT orbit for recordings and concerts—and many of those bands are just AMT members under a different name. There’s nothing really like AMT at all in rock. Perhaps their most natural peer is the Sun Ra Arkestra, a musical and social institution that cruises through the decades, picking up ideas and passengers along the way.
The AMT discography runs to over 100 studio albums and close to 70 live recordings. It’s all of a massive piece but that doesn’t mean it all sounds the same. Here are some major highlights on Bandcamp.
Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO
2 x Vinyl LP
Every cosmic journey begins with a single step. The first AMT studio album is the kind of step perhaps only Kawabata could make, an immediate immersion into a lo-fi world of flowers, paisley, and go-go boots—and that’s just this one track. The AMT vision of collapsing multiple cultural eras into one is there from the start.
Pink Lady Lemonade (Double Sweet Sucker Punch)
Compact Disc (CD)
The closest AMT has gotten to being a conventional outfit is through the song “Pink Lady Lemonade,†recorded during their first two years of existence. It runs like a thread through their discography, appearing on studio releases here, live recordings there. In its own way, the song is AMT’s Grateful Dead track, something from which listeners can divine slight changes in manner and mood as the contexts shift through the years. This album brings together three versions recorded from 1996 to 2019.
Black Magic Satori
Compact Disc (CD)
AMT’s psychedelia is a potent, sensual experience in itself, which can obscure what’s going on at a fundamental level. What this album shows is that, at their core, AMT are one hellacious band. Stripped down to Kawabata accompanied by synthesizer, bass, and drums, this is tremendous rock playing, with heavy riffs and exalted, intense soloing that approaches the limits of musical expression.
Speed Guru
This is another set of late ‘90s cassette recordings reissued digitally in 2023. Trippy, yes, but also, to borrow a phrase from another notable Japanese band, heavier than a death in the family. Extremely dense and often threatening, like Blue Cheer without the, er, cheer, there’s a kind of honesty in these tracks, a recognition that not all altered states are enjoyable.
For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Goofy Funk?
Compact Disc (CD)
Is there such a thing as outsider funk? It’s like the band read about funk and heard a couple songs on AM radio and decided, “We can do that too.†And they can, in their inimitable style, which means layering a free, psychedelic piano solo over an almost psychotically obsessive guitar riff.
Doobie Wonderland
AMT album titles often have a pun that refers to something else: Another record, a book, a movie. They don’t seem to mean anything; they’re just part of the free cosmic attitude that makes records like this possible. It’s like three different bands marching into the studio while playing, colliding with each other, and saying, “What the hell, keep going!â€
You Can’t Do That on the Radio Anymore
Compact Disc (CD)
Yes, AMT playing Terry Riley’s In C! Live! On radio station WFMU in 2002! Yes, In C is here in fragments, but the band isn’t so much playing through the entire piece as starting with it and then launching off into somewhere not previously imagined. That this was even done is remarkable.
Chaos Unforgiven Kisses or Grateful Dead Kennedys
Compact Disc (CD)
Add in the hardcore/punk drummer and violinist SSW Opera and you get AMT at an absolute thrashing peak. Heavy, but with sonic fury rather than psychic weight.
Acid Mothers Reynols Vol 2
Vinyl LP
AMT toured South America in 2017, and in Argentina they took the time to perform and record with the great experimental band Reynols. That produced two fantastic studio albums; heavily improvised and full of softer and calmer explorations from the band, but no less deep nor cosmic.
Remixtasy – Cometary Orbital Drive
Five remixes, including ones from Kawabata and AMT synthesizer player Higashi Hiroshi, of “Nanique Another Dimension – Cometary Orbital Drive,†a track from their live CD Love the Bomb From Uranus. It’s certainly odd hearing the band’s playing shoved into a regular, quantized beat, but then again, there’s a lot to be said for turning the AMT’s music into objects for others to play with.
Rebootleg Vol. 1
Compact Disc (CD)
There is copious live AMT material. This set is from an August 2022 show that introduces a new lineup anchored by bassist Sawano Shozo and featuring guitarist Jyonson Tsu. Fantastic heavy rock, full of color, details, bizarre images, and the sense of liberation that is probably AMT’s essence.
AMT24 Vol. 2
The band has started, with tremendous generosity, to compile and release their back catalog. With the unstated philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing in excess—just listen to the samples above—that means reissuing 24 hours of music at a time, and sometimes entire albums as single tracks. Remastered and in some cases remixed by Kawabata, the band explains the project: “Acid Mothers Temple’s discography is vast and can be likened to a labyrinth, which is why the band has released digitally the second of a series of 24-hour compilation albums tracing the band’s history. However, it is impossible to cover all our work in 24 hours, so as a sequel to the last installment, this time we have compiled in 24 hours the 10 years of their work from Acid Motherly Love (2007) to Astrogasm From The Inner Space (2014).â€
Trust Masked Replicants
Vinyl LP
The most recent (as of this writing) AMT release has a title that refers to Captain Beefheart, which provides even more of an explanation for just what this band is. AMT would never be confused for channeling Howlin’ Wolf, but their balance of chaos and control, exacting detail and cosmic sweep, shares values with Beefheart—and there’s some impressive homages to Gary Lucas on here. Another piece in the AMT puzzle, but the puzzle has no borders so keep your ears open for more to come.
